Clean water is critical to all life forms including humans or animal on this planet. With enhanced technology and information technology in recent years, demand of consumable drinking water or high quality drinkable water is steadily increasing across the globe. For example, readily available clean drinkable water can reduce disease, epidemic, poverty, and/or conflict throughout the world. With increasing world population and finite amount of clean water, demand of high quality clean water will continue in the future.
The standards for drinking water are typically set by governments, local authorities, or industry associations, and such standards typically set limits of maximum amount of contaminants that could have in the water but still safe for human consumption. To provide clean water, various water purification techniques have been developed over the years. For example, conventional purification systems include carbon filtration, membrane filtration, chlorination, ion exchange, oxidation, and/or reverse osmosis. A drawback associated with such techniques is that conventional purification techniques may require numerous treatment steps in order to be able to remove contaminants, such as living organisms, bacteria, viruses, arsenic, lead, and mercury.
A typical approach to solve the conventional purification system is to use vapor distillation process to purify water. A problem associated with a typical water distiller is that they are large, costly, and inefficient. For example, a conventional water distiller consumes large amount of energy such as electricity to produce small amount clean or distilled water. Another problem associated with a typical household or laboratory water distiller is that it takes hours to produce one gallon of clean water. Another drawback associated with a conventional thermal based purification system is that the heat generated by a conventional heat source has low efficiency, and the heating source is typically difficult to maintain.